Friday, 8 March 2013

Home Education UK tidies up its act (a bit)

I was pleased to observe that Mike Fortune-Wood revamped the home page of his site, Home Education UK, yesterday, in response to some of my criticisms here. This is encouraging, but more needs to be done! I cannot help noticing that Lord Brougham is still featured prominently. The quotation by him on the home page suggests that Lord Brougham did not approve of compulsory education and was in some way a supporter of home education. This is preposterous. I drew attention to the fact that he actually attempted to introduce a public education act in 1837 which would have paved the way for universal schooling. It would, if passed, have been similar to the 1870, Forster Act. Lord Brougham said at the time:‘ some legislative effort must at length be made to remove from this country the opprobrium of having done less for the education of the people than any of the more civilized nations on earth’He later became an even more fierce advocate of the importance of schooling; particularly for the working classes. In 1858, he said;‘There is an absolute necessity for changing, in important respects, the method of educating female children, not only in the humbler but the better part of the working classes. They must be taught things which are of use to them in after life. A good system of rewards, the judicious application of prizes, the due encouragement to successful teachers of common things, and a steady determination in the patrons of such schools to enforce the most useful teaching in the first instance’Enforcing 'useful teaching' in schools? This does not exactly sound like a ringing endorsement of home education in general, let alone autonomous learning, and I hope that Mike Fortune-Wood will now seen the light and remove all reference to Lord Brougham from the site. Next week, we shall examine a few of the people whom this site claims were home educated, starting with Frank Whittle; inventor of the jet engine; who began school at the age of five and left at the same statutory age as everybody else. Until then, readers might like to consider for themselves the extent to which the Wright brothers might properly be considered to have been home educated.

15 comments:

Well spotted! I am vastly obliged to you and how the first quotation mark ended up before 'Enforcing', rather than in front of 'useful teaching'; I will never know. Who needs to proof read with the vigilant commentators we have here? You will observe that this error has now been corrected!

Simon wrote,“The quotation by him on the home page suggests that Lord Brougham did not approve of compulsory education and was in some way a supporter of home education. This is preposterous.”

Simon, he was in favour of education, but not compulsion. None of the bills he introduced involved compulsion. Here’s a another quote giving his views on the issue.

“Of one thing I am morally certain, that in this country the Prussian system of education can never be adopted. The system of education in Prussia is arbitrary, is absolutely compulsory…Such a system may do very well for a country which, in reality, is but one great camp, but it would never be tolerated in England. I do not believe that any one measure could be devised by the mind of man so surely, so admirably calculated to make a system of education unpopular as that of compelling people to send their children to school. God forbid that such a system would ever be attempted in this country. I am decidedly averse to the introduction of a compulsory system in any sense whatever, either by forcing parents to send their children to school under certain penalties, or of depriving them of certain privileges if they refuse to let them attend.”

Simon quoted,‘There is an absolute necessity for changing, in important respects, the method of educating female children, not only in the humbler but the better part of the working classes. They must be taught things which are of use to them in after life. A good system of rewards, the judicious application of prizes, the due encouragement to successful teachers of common things, and a steady determination in the patrons of such schools to enforce the most useful teaching in the first instance’

This could also be understood to mean that the patrons should force teachers to provide useful teaching to female students (who are there by free will).

In fact, after some research, it appears that this quote is connected to a discussion about the improvement of teacher training. This is the paragraph before the one quoted by Simon,

"At the congress of the association in 185 7 and 1858 Brougham's attention had been directed also to a more practical side of education. The expediency of requiring a capacity and willingness to instruct in other than the ordinary accomplishments of music and French and the three R's was evident, for he said: ”

Ah, good, I like the trailer for next week. I've just started doing a project on Alexander Graham Bell with my son, and it mentions that he was home educated. Could you look at him too and save me researching how long he was HE for?

Which is an interesting question, isn't it? If a child is home educated for part of the time then goes to school and succeeds there triumphantly too, then who gets to claim the success? (Well, apart from the child, obviously.)

My sister is a university lecturer and she's commented that she can always spot a child who's been home educated even if it was only for a year or so because they question everything, but know how to get their heads down and work when they have to. I haven't worked out if she thinks that's positive or not.

Simon wrote,"Enforcing 'useful teaching' in schools? This does not exactly sound like a ringing endorsement of home education in general, let alone autonomous learning,"

What gives you the impression that it's included as an endorsement of home education? I would read it as being against compulsion in education, something that is certainly valued within autonomous education. Autonomous educators also provide ‘useful teaching’ to their children if they freely choose it. I see no incompatibility between Brougham's views and AE.

Brougham was against forcing children to attend school (or forcing parent's to send them). He felt that education should be valued and chosen freely and said, "in every corner of this country, the poor are deeply impressed with a sense of the vast importance of education, and willing to make any sacrifice within the bounds of possibility to attain it". He was in favour of improved training and inspection of schools as your later quote from him shows. But that's a very different issue.

'Simon wrote,"Enforcing 'useful teaching' in schools? This does not exactly sound like a ringing endorsement of home education in general, let alone autonomous learning,"

What gives you the impression that it's included as an endorsement of home education?'

Possibly the fact that it is found on the home page of the country's most popular site on home education? I as making the point that Lord Brougham believed that schooling and education were synonymous. I found this an odd person to choose as a champion of home education.

That's exactly what he'll like to hear given that he was schooled before we found home education. And a lot of home edders today are teachers, so I'll let his Dad off being a Professor. Bell's turning out to be a lot more interesting than I'd realised, and the intercom system we're building is fun too.

Next stop will be the lighthouse building Stevenson family, leading into Treasure Island and Kidnapped and Stevenson's own travels. RLS missed a lot of school due to ill health, so he may qualify as flexi-schooled.

Thanks 2 days running, Simon.(Now you really need to start to worry...)

Sorry. Robert Louis Stevenson is RLS... but I shortened it for ease of typing cos I've been typing it a lot as I worked out how I'd fit it all together and make something cross curricular, interesting, and sneaking in literature for someone who doesn't 'do' literature.

"Possibly the fact that it is found on the home page of the country's most popular site on home education?"

I'm not sure you can conclude that because a web site is highly listed in Google, it's the most popular site on home education in England, but that's by the by. It's also a site that is strongly in favour of autonomous education, which formed part of your original point when you said,

"This does not exactly sound like a ringing endorsement of home education in general, let alone autonomous learning,"

Lord Brougham was against compulsion in education, just as autonomous educators are. Might this not be the reason for it's inclusion on the front page of a site run by an autonomous educator?

Schooling in the early 1800s was synonymous with education for the poor, because the children's parents did not have the skills to teach their children how to read (obviously no longer the case, on the whole). But Brougham may have been in favour of autonomous education; at least once a person can read. He says:

“The people will never be their own instructors, until they so learn to read, that they will afterwards read to learn – not until they are taught to think while they observe, and observe while they think. The meagre unmeaning moiety of verbage, they now get from the schools, in the place of real, well defined knowledge, cannot help them in the difficult and sublime process of self-education; and we shall never see many who are the best taught of all – self-taught – so long as the schools give little or nothing to the people to commence with. A good elementary education is all that is necessary to self-instruction. Said Edmund Stone, the Mathematician: ‘Does any man need to know any more than the twenty-six letters, to learn anything else?’ But he must learn these twenty-six letters distinctly, and with delight – the first steps must be taken understandingly and with joy, or else he will not have that ability and strong desire to progress in the path of knowledge, so necessary to ensure success. It will not do to teach the child to say its primer, cypher to reduction, and hate knowledge all the rest of its life! If so instead of the people’s being ‘their own instructors,’ the great majority will live unknown and steal into a peasant’s grave.”

Simon wrote,“I drew attention to the fact that he actually attempted to introduce a public education act in 1837 which would have paved the way for universal schooling. It would, if passed, have been similar to the 1870, Forster Act.”

One big difference is that the 1837 Bill made no attempt to make education compulsory, whilst the 1870 Act gave Education Boards the power to make education compulsory in their area (using a by-law). This comment was made about the 1837 Bill by, the Marquess of Lansdowne, in the Lords:

“It was unnecessary for him to say, after the conversation which took place in that House a few evenings ago, that no intention existed on the part of the Government to force the adoption of a compulsory system of education, and there was no person more convinced than he was, that that could not form a part of any well-conceived plan, and he must also say, that it was not contemplated either by the Government or by any other body of persons whatsoever.”

The intention of the 1837 Bill was to make education available to those who wanted to take advantage of it - a genuine right, rather than what is effectively a duty for today's children. To my mind, a compulsory 'right' is a duty.

An interesting article from an American teacher and writer that resonates with Brougham’s views on education and also contradicts Simon’s views abut the need to teach a necessary body of knowledge.

”I have another, more unorthodox proposal for attacking the problem of disengagement. Most readers will consider it unthinkable, and some will write me off as a danger to the republic, but decades of working with kids tell me it would eventually trigger a performance explosion.That proposal: Make every required course at the high school level elective. And if, say, five or more students submit a request for a class not offered, work with them to design and offer it. Take seriously the contention usually attributed to Albert Einstein that, ‘Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid.’”“Yes, I have strong feelings about what kids should learn, which is why I’d put them in charge of their own educations. Experience assures me they’ll get where they need to go, and do so more efficiently than will otherwise be possible. Experience also tells me that won’t happen as long as they’re fenced in by a random mix of courses required because they’ve always been required, by courses based on elitist conceits, by courses shaped by unexamined assumptions. The core’s boundaries are far too narrow to accommodate the collective genius of adolescents.

Today’s reformers seem unable or unwilling to grasp the instructional implications of those differences and that complexity. They treat kids as a given, undifferentiated except by grade level, with the core curriculum the lone operative variable. Just standardize and fine-tune the core, they insist, and all will be well.